Baltimore, known as The Monumental City, is starting 2025 with one fewer monument after a raised plaque honoring a segregationist was removed from public property in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city.
The William L. Marbury Plaque was placed in the late 1930s at the south end of a wide median strip in the 1700 block of Park Avenue by the Mt. Royal Garden Club, a predecessor of today’s Bolton Hill Garden Club. That’s where it remained for nearly 90 years. It was installed to honor an attorney who lived in Bolton Hill in the early 1900s.
But in November, the plaque and its base were removed from the median strip, leaving a hole in the ground near the intersection of Park Avenue and Wilson Street. And on Wednesday, Baltimore’s Board of Estimates made the removal official when it voted 5 to 0 to “decommission” Marbury’s marker. According to a memo to the board from the city’s Procurement office, its removal from public property is consistent with the community’s wishes and the plaque has been given to the Marbury family, which was “willing and anxious” to receive it.
The inscription on the plaque gave little indication why it was placed on public property in the 1930s and why it was removed. It read:
WILLIAM L. MARBURY
Dec. 26, 1859 Oct. 26, 1935
PLANTED BY
MT. ROYAL GARDEN CLUB
Given the plaque’s wording, a casual observer could have thought Marbury was an avid gardener or at least a booster of the garden club. Some attorneys may know that he served as the United States Attorney for Maryland during the Grover Cleveland administration or as president of Maryland State Bar Association in 1910. He ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate in 1913. The firm where he and his son worked for many years, then known as Marbury Miller and Evans, merged in 1952 with Piper, Watkins, Avirett & Egerton to create Piper & Marbury, now part of DLA Piper.
But according to an article in the December issue of The Bolton Hill Bulletin by neighborhood resident David Nyweide, William Luke Marbury Sr. was also a segregationist — the founder in 1910 of the Mount Royal Protective Association, whose mission was “to halt African Americans from renting or purchasing property in the Mount Royal District, which included present-day Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill.”
Nyweide, a past president of the Bolton Hill Community Association, wrote in his article that Marbury had a record of promoting residential segregation.
“Marbury is credited with being the architect of redlining laws in Baltimore,” Nyweide wrote. “He actively tried to disenfranchise voters in Maryland with dark skin, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the U. S. Supreme Court that the State of Maryland could legally strip their voting rights because Maryland never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. He himself was a descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison roughly a century earlier, the case which famously established the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state laws and acts of Congress that contravene the Constitution.”
Historians also note that Marbury came from a family of plantation-owners in Southern Maryland who held slaves before moving to Baltimore in the 1870s. There is an unincorporated community called Marbury in Charles County, Maryland.
Researching Marbury’s past
In 2020, Nyweide wrote, the community association formed a committee to examine public markers in the neighborhood, including monuments, plaques and place names, that may honor individuals or institutions contributing to systemic racism. After conducting research on Marbury and consulting with the garden club, he said, the historic markers committee recommended, along with the garden club, to have Marbury’s plaque removed from the median strip, and the community association’s board agreed.
Nyweide linked in his article to the Bolton Hill committee’s report containing its findings about Marbury.
“Marbury helped draft several state bills designed to disenfranchise Black Marylanders’ voting rights from the late 1890s to 1911,” the report said. “As he told the Baltimore Sun in January 1910, ‘it is an anomalous condition that an inferior race should share the government with the superior one.’ “
By 1910, “Marbury had also become an advisor to members of the Baltimore City Council who were promoting residential segregation, and he help them draft a series of residential segregation laws between 1910 and 1917, among the earliest such urban statues in the country,” the report continued. “When they proved so conservative as to fail to pass constitutional muster in the Supreme Court, Marbury favored enforcement tools in the form of restrictive covenants and the Mount Royal Protective Association, which was founded with the explicit purpose to stop Black people from renting or purchasing homes in Bolton Hill.”
‘Would not be honored today’
Marbury “did not…simply hold beliefs about racial segregation that were not uncommon for other white people of his time,” the committee stated in its report. “[H]e was instead a locally prominent white man who actively shaped the world of Jim Crow during the early twentieth century” and the plaque “memorializes a former resident of Bolton Hill who would not be honored today for his public, proactive efforts to disenfranchise Black people and inhibit them from living in the neighborhood.”
Because of “the unverified reasons for the plaque’s placement but unequivocal knowledge of the revolting public reputation of the man honored by the plaque, the committee recommends removal,” the committee concluded, adding a suggestion that the plaque be given to “a Marbury descendant.”
The garden club’s executive committee agreed with the recommendation to remove the plaque, President Lisa Johnson said in a letter to the community association. The committee “considers the plaque to no longer represent the values of the garden club and the Bolton Hill neighborhood as it is a painful reminder to many of exclusionary and discriminatory times,” she wrote.
Nyweide said in his article that descendants of Marbury didn’t have any knowledge of the plaque but expressed interest in receiving it if it were removed from Bolton Hill. He said the community association worked with the city to follow disposition procedures, the plaque’s base was “unceremoniously dug up” in November and the plaque “has been tendered to Marbury’s descendants.”
‘No objection’ from the city
According to a memo on the agenda of the Jan. 8 Board of Estimates meeting, the community association’s request to remove the plaque was directed to the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks.
“Community reached out about having the small ‘garden’ plaque removed from the park,” the memo from the city’s Procurement office said. “Seeing little historical value and noting its size there was no objection to its removal.”
The Board of Estimates voted to decommission the plaque with no discussion, as part of a blanket vote on “routine” agenda items.
Although it was placed on city property by the garden club, the plaque “is not in anyone’s inventory of artifacts or memorials” and it wasn’t technically owned by the city, “just ‘planted’ in our park,” the Procurement office said in its memo. The city incurred no costs and lost no revenue as a result of its removal, the memo added.
‘Odious history’
Nyweide said in his article that there was some debate within the community about removing the plaque.
“Reasonable, dissenting voices to removing the plaque were concerned that it would erase the odious history it signified, where dispensing with it would be a convenient means of ignoring the history of segregation in Bolton Hill,” he wrote. “Yet, that history remains despite the absence of the plaque on the Park Avenue median, and the public historic markers committee’s work was a means of drawing attention to it. As the committee concluded, the plaque was placed to honor a man whose legacy would not be honored with such a plaque today by the Bolton Hill Garden Club nor by the Bolton Hill Community Association. His former residence does not bear a Blue Plaque [marking the homes of noteworthy Bolton Hill residents who have died.] The Marbury plaque’s placement amid a grassy median on Park Avenue had become as incongruous as the man himself would be today.”
Nyweide said the Marbury plaque didn’t get much attention when it was on public land and wasn’t tagged with graffiti, the way Baltimore’s Confederate statues were before they were removed in 2017.
“While it was on the Park Avenue median, the Marbury plaque attracted attention proportionate to its size,” he said. “It largely went unnoticed near the ground as an unassuming relic of a bygone era of Bolton Hill. Given the man’s prominent role in promoting actions and laws directly related to segregation and disenfranchisement, it is remarkable that the plaque never became a rallying point for protests, nor was it defaced with graffiti.”
He said he’s glad the plaque was intact when it was removed.
“To his descendants, the Marbury plaque is a familial artifact,” he wrote. “They had no say in inheriting the racist legacy of their forebearer, just as today’s residents of Bolton Hill did not live in the neighborhood of Marbury’s day. The Marbury plaque remains, just not where it was originally planted.”
